That Which Does Not Kill Me, Makes Me Stronger

by NotDownOrOut

As I was saying in my last post, the E.R. doctor identified my condition as a flesh-eating infection. It was not MRSA, thank goodness. But it was rare and life threatening. My memories of the first few days of my hospitalization are fuzzy. I was in great pain. I was being examined and tested and new diagnoses were coming in swiftly. I suddenly was diagnosed with diabetes. There was a chicken/egg aspect to it. Had my blood sugar gone out of whack due to the infection or had it been off the charts before the infection and made me more vulnerable to the infection? My blood pressure was climbing. Was this due to the stress I was under or was it a precursor to the infection? It was noted that the infection’s course seemed swift–even swifter than might be expected in the “normal” course of an abnormal condition. The nurses were hanging bags of fluids as fast as they could. I felt like I was one of those balloons at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Every inch of my skin seemed to be stretched as taut as it could be stretched.

I was prepped for surgery and do recall giving instructions that my sister had my power of attorney for healthcare purposes. She could make decisions for me if I was unable to make them.

My mom lives with me now. She is 80 years old. She had to move in with my sister and brother-in-law. We were all feeling upended and shaken by the situation. From my hospital bed, I could see a patch of sky that seemed so far away. Family members stood by the window and whispered softly. I handed over all of my belongings to my sister and wondered if we would ever see each other again. No one could say what the surgeons would find.

When the surgical team came for me, I was praying. How many times can we pray for someone to save us? I have decided that we can do it as many times as we need saving. It was icy cold in the operating room. The nurses and anesthesiologist were calm and friendly. They had questions for me. Could I help them transfer me from the transport cart to the operating table? When had I last taken water by mouth? Could I place my left arm just so on a board for that purpose? Did I have sleep apnea? Did I snore?

The temperature in the room felt good on my fevered flesh. I felt the first needle glide into the skin on my arm and I fell asleep.

That was the first of four abdominal surgeries. It was a protracted process to remove the infection. My surgeon was a plastic surgeon. He removed flesh from my right side to the left. I was not closed up between surgeries. Instead, as I understand it, the opening that went from side to side was lined with cloth. I was bound up tightly and attached to a vacuum that kept drawing out blood and infection from the area. I was reopened as necessary. My wound needed debriding in much the same way as a burn might require it. Infected tissue, dead tissue, and other flesh had to be removed as it was identified. The drain that was installed on me drew a pinkish jelly from me. I had a catheter. And, on that first night, after my surgery, I was left intubated in case I had to be rushed back to surgery.

My sister was unaware of that fact. She says she understood that I was being taken to the intensive care unit and the tube would be removed. But it was not. My first recollection post-surgery was that I was restrained at the wrists and ankles. I felt the tube in my throat. I panicked. I wanted to speak, but I could not. I was in a room with a sliding glass door, which was left open.

I heard things. I saw things out of the corner of my eye. I won’t trouble you with some of my memories, but they were disturbing. When I did get a nurse’s attention, she said to someone that I was receiving propofol. I could not be aware of my surroundings. I responded by struggling. I then heard someone say I was hysterical. I managed to yank my hand out of one restraint. I threw up fluid from my throat and had the unpleasant experience of having it coat my face and slide up my cheeks to my eyes. I did not understand that I was intubated. I remained panicked and wanted to speak out about things I was experiencing. Instead, I was drugged again to still my struggles.

It was a long night. I understand that my second operation took place in the morning without my awareness of it taking place.

I was more afraid during that long night than I was before I went in for surgery. In my hours of sleep or drugged awareness, I was in a black room with a black bird. The bird was huge, far bigger than I was, so not real. She had a small, beady eye the color of a raspberry. Her dark wings also were trimmed with narrow bands of the same color. She was regal in the darkness, but cruel, too. She pecked at my body with a long, narrow, black beak that tore at my flesh. I felt every piercing and called out to God for mercy.

Death seemed preferable to this punishment. I know I begged to be taken from the place in which I found myself. I cannot recall feeling any misgivings about that cry for the release death would represent. I cannot recall thinking of my family or my friends or my students or my work. I remember thinking that death would mean peace and escape from that pain. So . . . I do not think I imagined myself to be in HELL. I was suffering in this world and wanted to depart it.

We do not always get what we want.

After much suffering and even more begging for release, the bird disappeared, the room went dark, and something that looked like a turquoise and gold LP record spun into the room. The turquoise and gold pattern on the record resembled the symbol for yin and yang. There were words where the grooves would be in a record. I could not read them from my vantage point, but I could see the curves and lines of the letters. Then the record started to turn and the words became images and sounds and I saw events that had yet to occur. I saw myself awakening in a hospital bed. I heard my nurse saying she was logging onto the computer beside my bed using a specific password that was the same as the password of the nurse from the preceding shift–except she was going to add a two at the end. I saw myself learning to walk again. I saw myself wearing a hospital gown that was too big and yet managed not to cover me. I saw myself trying to work and finding it tough to focus visually and mentally. Some of the things I saw have not yet happened. But some of them have. I am finding it tough to recall some of what I saw as time goes by. Today I am almost three months from the start of my odyssey.

As the record came to an end a huge voice boomed out into the darkness: “Live more LIFE!”

I think it was God.

I woke up to see a nurse I recalled from what must have been intensive care on the night after my first surgery. In that first blinking assault of light it seemed that she was dressed in a uniform like the one Rosemary Clooney wore when she danced with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Vera-Ellen in White Christmas to the tune, “Hey, I Wish I Was Back in the Army.” Instead of being blue, it was khaki and she had an aviator’s white silk scarf around her neck. When she moved her shoulders, I could see her wings. She was the yang to the dark bird’s yin.

In another instant I was able to focus and see her as she is–she is a nurse and not a bird. I was awake. I did not feel much like living, but I was alive.

I spent sixteen days in intensive care. I would later meet my infectious disease specialist, a woman of few words, who told me I had been a few hours “from the dustbin.” She told me that nothing made her happy. But my surgeon had made her happy. He made her very happy because he did everything the right way. She said I was lucky because Plan B would have been hospice care until death.

I cannot tell you how many antibiotics she prescribed for me. She ordered repeated blood tests and measured the profusion of infections in my blood. As I understand it, flesh-eating diseases like mine come from “common” infections like strep (usually strep), staph, or e-coli. These infections surround us. They are on our skin. But they seldom inhabit us without being let in, and a healthy immune system usually fights such infections off. In the case of the disease I had, that red spot on my abdomen had been a door left ajar. One of those “ordinary” infections was opportunistic. It crept in and took hold. She never did tell me which infection I had. I have the impression I had more than one. As my medical team continued to work on me there were two more surgeries and a last debriding.

Thanks to the brilliance of my doctors, I was declared infection-free by my surgeon on May 30. The infectious disease doctor concurred and took me off of antibiotics about two days later.

There is more story to tell, and I will tell it here. But for now I will say this: The infectious disease doctor has a working hypothesis that the disease entered at my abdomen where the scar from my hysterectomy was because the flesh there had figuratively become like a sponge and not like a solid. Chemotherapy and radiation might have converted what was fat into what was food for the infection. I had an infection that did not feed on air. It fed on bacteria. And the infected flesh bred bacteria and infection. So, in a way, cancer treatment (that which did not kill me) made me weaker and more vulnerable.

However, my infection spread through fat. It never spread beyond it. Unlike many who have contracted such an infection and were not treated in time, I did not die. Unlike many who have had the infection reach a body organ or a limb, mine did not spread and I will not suffer a permanent disability. I have seen different statistics since I got out of the hospital. Some speculate there are fewer than a thousand cases diagnosed each year. Untreated, the disease is fatal. Due to the difficulties of identifying the disease, I have seen statistics showing as many as 40% of cases end in death and another 40% of cases end with permanent disability. The flesh, tissue, or organs that becomes infected cannot be cured. It has to be removed. I appear to be in the 20% of cases that end well. So the porous fat that made me weaker ended up saving me. Had it not been there for the infection to consume, I might have been a fatality or a casualty of the infection.

That which did not kill me made me strong enough to survive. It appears I will have an opportunity to live more life.

One Comment to “That Which Does Not Kill Me, Makes Me Stronger”

What an incredible story of survival and an exceptionally well written post. I found myself reading as fast as I could to find out what happened next at each twist and turn. You really should write a book. I’m glad you’re still here to do so. Talk about an inspirational piece, this is gold.